Thank you for pointing your readers to my response. As I said, I recognize that more clearly outlining what blogs I included in my statistics and an altered title may have saved me this conversation. I am planning a new post, “How Do You Blog? 2.0,” which will clarify my intent for those of my readers who do not read the comments on my blog.

Although I recognize that your post was overall, simply an analysis and comparison, your fourth paragraph, which is in bold, in a larger font, and follows your recap of my method and results, states “95% confident, 100% wrong. . .” While, yes, other text is similarly bold and in a large font, I felt this proclamation was misleading, despite the fact that you elaborate later in your post. As we are both sadly aware, despite all the time and effort we put into writing our blogs, most readers simply skim the content or begin reading a post curious of its content, only to never finish it. I felt compelled to respond to ensure that “95% confident, 100% wrong. . .” was not the last impression left on any of your readers.

Again, thank you for pointing your readers to my response. It is greatly appreciated. I have similarly added an update to my post, which points to your response so that, despite how it may have felt on this end, it is clear that you were not, in fact, “taking far too much pleasure in pulverizing my oranges and credibility with your apples.”

Happy Blogging,

Sarah
(Please, call me Sarah)

As you can see, I have no intention of truncating or editing your reply–and, in fact, have modified my post to highlight your reply.

I’ll admit that I didn’t (and don’t) feel I was taking “far too much pleasure in pulverizing” your work. I did feel it was appropriate to point out that the conclusion as stated, that Blogger is by far the most popular platform for “librarians who blog,” is probably not true if “who blog” is defined as “who currently blog on an ongoing basis.”

If I was going out of my way to trash your work, I most certainly would not have included these paragraphs:

“Yes, I know, a 95% confidence level only means that, for 20 samples of the same size, 19 of them will have results within 5% of these results. And if the sample is taken with no regard for all of the long-abandoned blogs in LISZen (and every other blog directory), blogs that tend to stay around forever if they’re on Blogger, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the results were similar to those in the post.

So maybe I should revise what I’m claiming here. I’m claiming that library people who blog on an ongoing basis are at least as likely to use WordPress as Blogger. And I guess that’s a different claim.”

The title of the post was “How you blog and confidence levels.” It linked directly to your post. I agreed that your results were what they were–that, given your methodology and definitions, the results made sense.

Your excerpted response doesn’t include the first paragraph of your comment:

“Where’s the excitement in just reporting someone else’s data? It’s so much more fun to craft a pie chart instead of just inserting a link.”

The Bunless Librarian here. I’m flattered that someone of your caliber has spent his time dismantling a survey of mine, even if you were less than gentle about it.

I could have saved you the effort of writing this post had you simply waited for me to reply to the comment you left on my blog.

Excerpts from my reply,

“The discrepancy between the popularity of Blogger and WordPress is interesting. Blogger coming out ahead in my survey is most likely the result of LISZEN as my population . . . . As many of the blogs listed in LISZEN are now defunct, it may be better categorized as an archive. . . .

Curious about Blogger’s dominance on LISZEN, I compared my sample to “Blogs in The Liblog Landscape.” 131 (nearly half of my sample) do not appear on your list (probably because they are defunct or inactive) . . . . the blogs that do not appear in your list lean heavily toward Blogger. . .

I knew that many blogs were defunct or inactive, but chose to include them because my information does not reflect “current” blogs, but blogs that are or have been authored by librarians. . . .”

http://thebunlesslibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-do-you-blog.html

“95% confident, 100% wrong…” This, of course, is assuming that only your work on blogging statistics is valid. While I respect the time and effort you put into your work, as I demonstrated in my reply, you were measuring apples and I was measuring oranges, which accounts for the discrepancies in the results. I must stand by my 95% confidence level and my results overall. Though I do recognize that more clarity about what exactly I was measuring may have avoided this conversation. In retrospect, I would have titled my post “How Do You Blog (Or Perhaps More Aptly, Did You Blog?).”

Mr. Crawford, to date, I have 68 readers of my blog, 35 (a generous estimation) of which read my survey results. That is 35 people who would have read my blog and perhaps thought, through no intention of my own, “hmmmm . . . these number’s are different from those found in Walt’s book-length study.” I would have happily written a second post clarifying the difference between your work and my survey had I known the passion behind your short comment would bring us here. I did try to accomplish that clarity in my very long reply to your comment, which was unfortunately posted after “how you blog and confidence levels” appeared here.

You have hundreds of subscribers through Google Reader, to say nothing of other feed readers. My post, which never claimed to contradict or compare to your work, was read by 35 people. This post, in which you seem to take far too much pleasure in pulverizing my oranges and credibility with your apples, was read by hundreds, maybe thousands.

I would like to challenge you to help repair any damage that may have been done to my reputation by this post. I ask that you post this reply to your blog, in its entirety, so that I may defend my results to those who have read this post. I will gladly post it on my own blog, but as I have stated, my audience is a humble few compared to yours.

–Sarah Lovato